How to Teach When Students are Years Behind
The curriculum decrees an essay must be written, but your students can barely write a sentence. How can you teach when your students are years behind?
Teaching strategies you can use in the classroom to up your education game
How to Design a Novel Unit that Doesn’t Bore your Students to Death: A Guest Blog Post From Yaddy’s Room
You have a boring novel unit, now what? Connect a movie to it! Luckily for you, I’m going to save you the blood sweat, and hangovers, and give you my process. I know. I’m awesome.
Is Dear Martin the Right Novel for Your Class?
When I read Dear Martin by Nic Stone, I knew it would be a fantastic whole class novel. In this post, I will help you determine if it’s right for your class, point out the perks of teaching it, and also hopefully help steer you away from some pitfalls.
Are Reading Worksheets Dead?
We all know there are better forms of assessment. There are better ways of engaging readers. (There is, perhaps, no better way of disengaging readers!). So, is it time to ditch the reading worksheets?
Why I Love Teaching Young Adult Literature
I started my journey to add young adult literature to my classroom when I finally ran out of patience for our outdated African American unit. The updates went so well, I’ve begun branching out into my other classes and units. I have found that young adult literature is especially great for engaging my at-risk students. Better yet though, it’s engaging for me. When I’m teaching more contemporary novels, I’m more thoughtful and engaged in my teaching.
Increase Student Engagement with Authentic Assessments
I know I am not alone in the engagement challenge. In a world where my students can stream fist fights or stand-up comedians, how do we get them to care about what's going on in our little classrooms?
How and Why to Use Scaffolding Worksheets in the Creative Writing Classroom
In a creative writing class, however, where rules are meant to be broken, creativity is unrestrained, and student skill levels vary wildly, providing that scaffolding can be a challenge. How, then, do you guide students and provide support without limiting their creativity?
How To Close Read a Whole Novel with Student of Any Skill Level
When I went to high school, it was easy to spot the honors and AP students. They walked around with classic novels, probably written by old white guys, practically exploding with post-it notes and rainbows from all the highlighting they’ve done within the pages. ....Meanwhile, in the regular class, they watched the Odyssey for the third time.